Networking Articles

Inspired by Tim Bray's recent post about encrypting his website, I decided to enable and force HTTPS for bugsplat.info. The process was straightforward and, turns out, completely free. Read on to find out how and why.

Almost all of my applications, both public and personal, run on a collection of virtual private servers (VPSs) hosted in various places including DigitalOcean and my own data center (i.e. the Mac mini in my basement). For a long time I've wanted to set up certain things, like centralized logging or metrics collection, but I've always been stopped by this idea that I can't run that stuff across the public network.

A few months ago I ran across a product named ZeroTier that, among other things, allowed me to set up this network without having to invest the time in attempting to build (or purchase) a traditional VPN. This post is going to talk about why, and how, you can replicate this setup.